Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Swiftness, Ender's, Streams
When it comes to records, context begets significance. Fandu writes: "In regards to the article about the new internet2 land speed record.. That is not correct, The Canadian CA*Net3 network is about 60X faster still. It may be a net speed record for Internet2, but it's certainly no new internet speed record. See the ABC Article about the network from a few years back and the NOC webpage."
And no one is in line for tickets yet? flea writes: "So, fans of orson scott card (to whom I was turned onto by luna) should be happy. The books Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are on the track to being made into a movie. Script is being written and OSC is involved in the process. It's being made by Wolfgan Petersen, who has a few hits and misses (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Petersen,+Wolfgang); Air Force One and Outbreak are, well, ya know ... To his credit though, he did Enemy Mine, the movie with Louis Gossett Jr. playing the speach impediment'd alien trapped on a rock after a battle with Dennis Quaid and then LGj gives birth (wtf). C'mon, we all liked that. Anyway, it hasn't even started filming yet and the script isn't done, but things look good. More info here."
Speak up for Ogg Vorbis! SgtChaireBourne writes: "The BBC's testing period for Ogg Vorbis is now finished, but they are still soliciting feedback.
Now's the chance to add any words of encouragement to the BBC regarding Ogg, especially since, perhaps by oversight, RealOne (formerly RealPlayer) is now only available for Windows 98, 2000, ME, NT and XP. Currently, the download page for older versions seem to turn up empty for all requests for Linux versions, but deep links can still get you there.
As far as I can tell, the BBC is the first large (or even medium) news service to try Ogg. Here is last year's announcment on Slashdot about the start of the test."
"Sounds cool." blocksetter writes: "Cool Chips plc appreciates the interest of the Slashdot community. We've made an effort to address the points raised in last week's discussion of our technology and we've posted the resulting FAQ on our site. In the interest of conserving bandwidth, a text-only version is available for your viewing pleasure. We would like to thank everybody whose questions and criticisms inspired us to do this.
If there is something we haven't covered, you can also write directly to Cool Chips President Isaiah Cox, or to myself, Company Wonky Chris Bourne."
Click here or here.
I think the record wasn't just that they transmitted at that speed, but that they did it over the massively long distance which they did, over oceans and all. I don't think an intra-Canadian network can really claim that they transmit as far.
Man, I hope they find a lot of good child actors. With the exception of the sixth Sence and the City of Lost Children I have yet to see an excellent job done by a child filling a more adult personality.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Now's the chance to add any words of encouragement to the BBC regarding Ogg, especially since, perhaps by oversight, RealOne (formerly RealPlayer) is now only available for Windows 98, 2000, ME, NT and XP.
WinAmp has support for playing Ogg Vorbis files.
Funny someone would name an encoding format after a caveman...
transgaming is awesome software! I've just been playing Warcraft 2 (Battle-net edition, the old one was DOS and needs Dosemu), Deus Ex, and Counter-strike. All without leaving linux, and all *with* the ability to change workspaces to talk in Gaim while I'm playing (in between rounds of counter-strike can get tedious, after all).
Wolfgang Petersen also did Das Boot, one of the best war movies of all time. (IMHO) This could be a spectacular film under his direction.
What an unfortunate job title...what the hell is a 'Company Wonky'?
I bet that looks real good on a resume.
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instructions and link to get it: RealOne
There is NO direct link to the download because of the registration process.
Here is how to get it:
1) Goto http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html
2) Fill in the form and Choose Linux 2.x (libc6 i386).
3) click on "Download Community Supported Player"
4) Don't click on the normal download links. Go look at the very bottom of the page. You will see
" RealOne Player for Unix - Preview Release If you would like to try the alpha version of RealOne Player for Linux 2.2 x86, use the button below." 5) Click on that button and download
Who is luna? Are slashdot submissions going to have shout-outs in them like MTV's TRL now?
i hope you were joking. if not you are one of the first people to say that about that book. personally, i really liked it, but thats just me.
-- john
Ya know, I had the same impression the first time through. Borrowed it with a batch of high-fantasy sci-fi from a friend, read it in a couple days, and thought it was a nice piece of fluff.
It was after reading Speaker for the Dead and being totally blown away, that I went back and reread Ender's. The second time through, I noticed the themes and characters had much more depth than I'd perceived the first time. It really is quite well though-out, prophetic and moving. The ending section (after battle school) is a bit rough though, and contributed to the weak first impression.
Yes, but if you really read the books you'd know that that is how bugger colonies greet each other. Ender just shakes hands really enthusiastically, is all.
So they're finally going to do a movie based on it? Oh great. Yet another movie for the slashdot community to bitch about. ;)
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
The long developmental time for films is a frustrating and, sometimes, sad thing. One of our greatest writers, Philip K. Dick, died just before getting to see the screen adaptation of his fabulous novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
That was particulary sad because, as told in Lawrence Sutin's excellent Divine Invasions : A Life of Philip K. Dick, this would have been a self-vindicating landmark in a life tortured by schizophrenia and criminal disregard by literary critics.
It's worth noting that Douglas Adams also died after years trying to get a film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy off the ground.
There is NO direct link to the download because of theregistration process.
Here is how to get it:
1) Goto http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html
2) Fill in the form and Choose Linux 2.x (libc6 i386).
3) click on "Download Community Supported Player"
4) Don't click on the normal download links. Go look at the very
bottom of the page. You will see
" RealOne Player for Unix - Preview Release
If you would like to try the alpha version of RealOne Player for
Linux 2.2 x86, use the button below."
5) Click on that button and download.
Ender's Game is a great book... totally deserved the Hugo. Even if you didn't like it much, read some of the sequels -- both the Ender sequels (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, etc.) and the Shadow sequels (Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, etc.) are very well done as well. Intelligent stories with all the character interplay, mind games, and plot twists of a Herbert or Asimov.
If they can do anywhere near as good a job with this as with Spider-Man (read: a few minor changes from the original, a few dumb scenes, but still an enjoyable movie), I'd be more than willing to plop down $20 or whatever a movie will cost in 2006.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Give us Larry Niven movies instead!
I dunno, I think The Outer Limits would be the best vehicle for his stuff. They did a pretty good job with "Inconstant Moon" already.
I'd really love to see them do something with "Flash Crowd," though.
~Philly
The land speed record is not how fast your network is in aggregate. It's how fast and how far you can push a single pair of hosts using TCP. How fast the backbone links are on CANet is entirely irrelevant. Lot's of big providers have links running at OC-12 or OC-48, both of which are faster than 400Mbps. Abilene itself routinely runs links at over 400Mbps 24/7. Check out the graphs
But how fast an aggregate link is isn't the point. It's how fast you can send data from one computer to another. If you've ever actually tried to send data at over 100Mbps on the WAN, you would know how hard it is. To get 400Mbps requires the link to not only be fast enough, but to have essentially zero loss. And to get several networks that are that clean, especially to Europe, is pretty amazing. If you don't believe me, try sending a CD's worth of data across your room at that speed. Never mind sending it across the Atlantic Ocean.
I am a huge fan of the book but has anyone read the scriptment that OSC put up on the net? Ughhhh it was BAD It sounded more like Wing Commander than Ender's Game. Anderson is turned into a woman, Bean is more prominent in order to do the sequel (sidequel), Peter and Valentine are removed from the story altogether. The P and V thing I understand, a lot of the other stuff just shows how bad a FILM writer OSC is.
my $.02
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
A - To the other side of the chip. From there it still has to be dissipated like normal except that the cool side stays cold and can be used to cool, for example, computer chips or the inside of a refrigerator.
Like the McDLT - The HOT side stays HOT and the COOL side stays COOL!
sulli
RTFJ.
At least the grammar on /. submissions will be better than on TRL, this crowd appreciates the finer points of the English language.
Wait a minute......
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
It's really nice to get quality radio on a non-traditional device. I should mention that I'm posting this from my iPAQ too :-)
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
I found Ender's Game characters uninspiring and predictable.
The ending was also a real cop-out, I was as disappointed with the conclusion of Ender's Game as I was with Asimov's 3001.
According to someone on the Vorbis User and Discussion List, "Ogg Vorbis" is named after the "ogg tactical maneuver" in Netrek and Vorbis after the Terry Pratchett character from the book Small Gods.
What does the name "Ogg Vorbis" mean?
First, Vorbis was taken from a character of an ''exquisitor'' in the book
"Small Gods," a title in a series of Terry Pratchett fantasy novels.
Formally, Vorbis is the name for the specific audio compression scheme used
to create Ogg Vorbis files. It is ultimately part of the Ogg Vorbis CODEC
project (a branch of the overarching, open-multimedia Ogg project), which is
headed by Christopher Montgomery and his team.
cpeterso
I want to see GP hulls, Puppeteers, Kzinti, etc. on the big screen!
Maybe you are using the new Netscape Tab feature, as you posted under wrong story. ;-)
Help fight continental drift.
I'm guessing a Niven movie would involve a species with uncontrollable breeding pressures and limited resources...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Man, I hope they find a lot of good child actors. With the exception of the sixth Sence and the City of Lost Children I have yet to see an excellent job done by a child filling a more adult personality.
Hardly movie-quality, but - the kid who played Picard in the "four people get turned into children" TNG episode did a damned good job.
If you're serious about understanding the topic, and not just looking for a "QM in 21 days for Idiots in a Nutshell" version, hunt down Richard Feynmann's "Lectures on Physics" series, especially Volume III (IIRC). He was an incredibly intelligent man, and a gifted communicator; the lecture series is a good (if complex) read.
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Check out Kuro5hin.org for 2 good articles by a guy trying to get his Doctorate in particle physics. The first article is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/1/3712/31700
2
The second is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/14/19363/814
Both are general physics introductions, but they talk about quantium structure. There are also several good articles on howstuffworks.com explaining specifics of physics in detail.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The thing that makes Ender's Game such a great book is that the small unwashed masses of alienated, hyper-intelligent geeks could truly empathize with Ender on an emotional level. We can understand his trials and feel his pains. We can also understand his pyrrhic victories. The rest of the books are good (for the most part) but that visceral sense of identification gets left behind. And, in Ender's Shadow, Card tries to shift that sense of identification from Ender to Bean. He fails miserably. He comes closer, yet also fails with Qing-Jao.
In the first book, Ender's Game, Card forges an emotional envolvement with Ender. (Well, if you're an alienated, hyper-intelligent geek anyway). The rest of the books in the initial series -- Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind -- are good. He comes closest to reforging that emotional link in the Xenocide/Children of the Mind sub-duology with the character of Qing-Jao. He doesn't quite make it though...I can truly empathize with a braniac with no friends, an obsessive-compulsive super-braniac is a bit beyond my league.
He repeats himself in the sub-duology of Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. Yes, Bean is super-smart. But he's a genetically engineered human. Card has once again taken what worked with Ender and altered the character so much that readers can't truly relate.
Damn, I've been rambling. The point that I'm trying to emphasize (out of the many points that I've made) is that the appeal of Ender's Game is that readers could honestly and wholely identify with the main character. I don'think that the same sense of identification will come across on the screen.
would involve a species with uncontrollable breeding pressures and limited resources...
Like humans?
All in all, though, I'd much rather see something from Clifford Simak's works done instead... "Mastadonia", "Cemetary World", or... mmmm... "The Big Front Yard". (IMDB does list Anomaliya, based on "All Flesh is Grass". Wonder how good that is.)
(And what the @*&!^#*&? happened to the "Watchmen" movie?)
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
While I never got a change to try out the BBC Ogg Vorbis streams (because my net connection is a mere 56k modem shared to 3 computers) I am quite interested to hear how it would have sounded with the encoding settings they have used. Below is a quote from the BBC website explaining the settings they used.
:)
Currently there is a Radio 4 stream, and two Radio 1 streams using different quality settings to ices. The _low is using -q 0, whilst the _high is using -q 3. I'd be interested to know if anyone can tell much difference between them (challenge for all you audiophiles out there
Now I have been mucking around with Ogg Vorbis for a few months and I have encountered some quite impressive results. On my website I have music downloads and I store them at -q 2, which equates to a nominal bitrate of 80-96 and in my opinion is on par with a MP3 using VBR ranging between 112-160. At this setting it still has a few minor artifacts but for the most part they aren't noticable and thus makes a good setting for free music downloads.
Furthermore I encode my CD collection at -q 5 and on my decent stereo and headphones I can't tell the difference between the original CD and the Ogg Vorbis track. For those interested this stores my guitar based music at an average bit-rate of 160-190 and electronic at 190-250 roughly speaking.
Anyway long story short, from my past experience it sounds like the high quality stream at a quality setting of 3.00, which I am guessing equates to a nominal bit-rate of 135 or so would have sounded pretty darn good. Definitely better than FM reception and perhaps almost as good as CD quality depending on the setup used. Can anyone verify or comment on this?
aus.music.scrapbook
is it just me, or is Ogg Vorbis kind of a dumb name for a multimedia format?
I'm sorry, I don't mean to troll, I just want to find people who agree. Think of this-"I have 5600 MP3s".
Now replace it- "I have 5600 [Ogg Vorbis's|Ogg Vorbis Multimedia Files|Ogg Vorbis Audios]".
It doesn't work. It's like legos. You don't say I have 2030 Lego brand entertainment bricks, or 2030 Lego bricks. You say I have 2030 Legos. This, imho, is Ogg's greatest downfall. The project works great, the compression is good, the audio sounds pretty dang good, but it will never catch on, first because of the large installed base of mp3s and players, and second, because it just sounds dumb.
Please quote where I said either "Hate" or "Extrememly Dislike".
What exactly about it wasnt polite?
The novella would be the easiest to translate to the screen. Less character baggage to explain, simpler to build a screenplay off of (as opposed to translating a novel, where great big hunks of exposition and internal viewpoints get hacked off to fit the medium.) It wouldn't be the Ender's Game we know, but there's no way it ever would, even if it was OSC writing the script himself. You can't step into the same river twice.
Okay, any Swedes out there? I've been trying to get SR to move away from RA and embrace Ogg Vorbis. It would be great if we could get together, write up something official'ish and all sign it.
If that is not your thing, consider simply emailing SR and let them know that you would prefer Ogg Vorbis.
When I did this a year ago they argued that a) RA is available for 'all' platforms and that b) HTTP is not suitable for streaming. I think those are pretty weak arguments, and so in about two months (making it a year since last time) I will again make my voice heard.
Also, that was before BBC did their tests, so that is new ammunition, especially if they start using it for "real".
Email me if you want to join up.
We're _paying_ SR via taxes, remember that. They should listen to us.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Er, there's this nifty layman's book called A Brief History Of Time by Steven Hawking. I found this book particularly interesting because he explains everything in nice simple terms and doesn't assume you've just taken a college-level calc course. Of course, i'll probably get flamed to a crisp for even mentioning this book or something.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Impossible? Then use animation.
Given the chances you've raised three genius-level exceptionally brilliant prodigies, I'd say your experiences count for very little. I think Card's characterizations are spot-on and perfectly legitimate.
Currently, I'm tutoring a 9-yr old girl in sophomore-level college English, because her parents felt like she needed some rounding-out before she got her BS. I think she'd do OK in Ender's world... she'd certainly feel more at home than she does now.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Anyone remember Bugsy Malone ? It's a gangster film where all the roles are played by child actors; and no, it isn't too corny, but as I remember it it's a pretty good 'Untouchables' style romp (except the guns fire pies I think - it's been a long time since I last saw it).
Also, how are they gonna manage the amount of naked kids in the book? The clothing issues and the psychology of being naked were an important part of the book.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
He's so far beyond smart, that even if you're smart, you're supposed to be alienated. And as he is, he is paying the ultimate price (his early death) for it. Now, you may sympathize -- since everyone different typically pays some sort of price, extracted by some peer group at some point -- but you cannot know him. Bean is also an asshole. He's out to accomplish his goals, and he's only really capable of non-manipulative human contact if he has nothing left to accomplish. If he's trying to do something, then look out -- he'll play everyone around him as he feels will best achieve his goal. Ender was unlike bean; Ender was a Carnegie sort of leader. He rallied people around him because he lifted them up and up, until they followed him out of love and admiration. That's why Ender was loved, and Bean does not inspire the same. But Ender grew up with 5 years of loving parents; Bean hid in a toilet to escape being killed as a baby, and spent his first few years staying alive on the streets.
Wether their cooling chips work or not, the company deserves some credit for a) posting a fairly informative FAQ (with references to peer-reviewed pub), b) making that FAQ available in a text-only version which will hopefully not get slashdotted again, c) using the following sentence: "However, the equipment needed to build chips capable of being accurately tested for cooling is expensive, and a royal pain to set up and calibrate.", d) giving our the name and e.mail of their two contacts, a suit *and* a geek.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Screw "Ender's Game", the movie... when do we get "Ender's Game", the GAME? I mean, come on, it's right there in the title!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Ender's Game?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
There's lots of speculation of how studios are
longing for high quality CG in order to have
a better bargaining position with actors,
but child actors who don't prance like prima
donnas are still a major headache. They have
growth spurts in the middle of a shooting period,
or break their voices, et cetera. The first
massive use of CG actors IMO is likely to
be done for child characters.
I've always thought Ender's game was supposed to end after the 'victory'. Lunacy or suicide ties everything up, and everyone is happy. "The good of the many(us)..." and all that. It's like the publisher came down from on high and forced Card to write a happy ending. I hope the movie ends where the book should've.